Hunger Knows None of That

Alice had put the other Land Girls to shame with the way she worked. Two weeks in, she could harvest a field in twice the time it took girls who’d been here six months. She cut through wheat with the same poise and intensity she used to coerce long buttery notes from her fiddle; the golden cords bowing at every deft stroke. That she would trip over her own instrument? None of us could believe it.

One minute we were all together laughing at Mrs. Lowry’s waddling gait as she chased chickens past the coop and the next we were six dirt-gloved hands struggling to stem the warm flow from her abdomen. Nancy did her best to fashion a tourniquet from her work apron but it soon disappeared into the red of Alice’s ripped one. I couldn’t do much but try to keep my fingers from slipping and my mind clear from shock. I focused on her throat as it swelled and sank and squeezed back pain. It soon made me sicker than the touch of blood. The dark took me the same time it did Alice and when I finally came too, it was a quarter past the hour; not ten minutes after Alice slipped away.

I couldn’t help but mourn first the music she took with her; songs of the Irish rebellion I first heard her play on the docks of the Southampton when we were both two girls newly twenty and all at once grown. Both our fathers stood solemn against the helm of the naval ship, hers gritting his teeth, chin pointed like an arrow towards the sun, and mine waving tear-soaked kisses from his hands. Though Alice looked straight on with eyes sharp and dry, her fiddle seemed to weep endless verses of “Foggy Dew”:

Right proudly high over Dublin town

They hung out the flag of war

‘Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky

Than at Suvla or Sud el Bar

And from the plains of Royal Meath

Strong men came hurrying through

While Brittania’s huns with their long range guns

Sailed in through the foggy dew

I connected right away to the sorrow of her song though many of the other girls found it ignoble and distancing to say the least. It was all too often she’d wipe from her face the spit of one of the girls claiming her to be a blight on the British Empire.

“Why are you even here if your loyalties aren’t,” Helen had said before grumbling beneath her breath something about potato eaters and how they should watch their back.

I’d always felt a bit guilty about that. After we’d watch our fathers drift away with packs heavy and guns loaded, we embraced a long while. In the face of another person’s loss, her resolve finally crumbled. The fine lines of her face fell to a crashing wave on the sea front. It was then I told her my plans to join the Land Army; to find a use for myself beyond willing the war to be over.

I once asked Alice if she every regretted signing away a year of her life to be with this lot; if she ever regretting following me on this path. She was quick to reassure me.

“My father used to tell me stories, from day of the famine, of little boys and girls with jaundiced faces and green lips, their stomachs full of grass,” she said. “I’d get nightmares about them gnawing on my bed legs. It’s not an image I want any part in making real. Or not doing a thing to stop it.”

I cried to sleep that night as some of the other girls did, though I made sure none of them could hear me humming the chorus of “Foggy Dew” into her pillow; flat and prickly with feathers but a soft cushion to the fiddle underneath.

The next day, before the other girls rose, I picked a few threads of wheat still brandished with what looked like freckles of a quail egg; dark portals to the half-formed life inside. These I braided to form a bracelet. By mid-afternoon, the rest were cut into mounds for the distribution lot. I asked Mrs. Lowry what the London masses would think if they knew Alice’s blood laced their daily Grant loaves. She brushed the thought off with a stiff laugh and fist on her hip.

“Hunger knows none of that,” she said. And though I wasn’t sure if this was true, I knew right away that Alice would agree.

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